Smoke on the Water
by Sir-Mercutio-McHuffer
Summary: It is a cold day in hell when Rose Tyler's vortex manipulator finally kicks the bucket. It's a cold day in the helicarrier when Nick Fury receives an unexpected guest.
1. Chapter 1

**AN:** This is what happens when I go on the internet and accidentally stumble across 'Top 34 crossovers you wish would actually happen' and Beloved-Stranger is the enabler of all enablers. I SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED ON THE INTERNET, GUYS!

This will be a fic written in really teeny tiny snippets at random times when inspiration strikes me. I also have plans for another cross-over fic entitled "Instant Orgy, Just Add Jack Harkness" or that might become a demented offshoot of the DoctorMagpie fic we're working on.

This is total, unashamed, self-gratification. This is all I write these days. ENJOY :D

**Disclaimer:**

I own nothing you recognise. This is all completely un-beta'd and totally fresh off the top of my brain!

* * *

><p>It is a cold day in hell when Rose Tyler's vortex manipulator finally kicks the bucket. She'd managed to hide in a water closet – an actual water closet, not one of those closets where you put your hot water cylinder, but a closet filled with water – and hold her breath for long enough to grab some coordinates and launch into the abyss.<p>

It hadn't worked out well, for herself or her vortex manipulator. The howling chasm, the unadulterated stream of time had crept around the manipulator's shields. Peeled back her skin, flayed the flesh, shunted down synapses and screamed through her spinal fluid. Took her apart. Put her back together.

Then dumped her head-first into a pile of snow on a desolate plane of ice.

Her fingers clench around frozen flakes, nerve endings hissing as fire curdles her insides and ice caresses her skin. Deep within her, something gold, something glorious, raises its head and snarls, gut deep and terrifying and wonderful to the edges of time and space. It unfurls as her head rises from the slurry, eyes dripping light and teeth flashing.

She disappears without a sound.

* * *

><p><em>Like it? Love it? Review it!<em>


	2. Chapter 2

**AN:** This chapter is all Beloved-Stranger.

**Disclaimer:**

I own nothing you recognise. This is all completely un-beta'd and totally fresh off the top of my brain!

* * *

><p>It's a cold day in the helicarrier when Nick Fury receives an unexpected guest. She appears, quite suddenly, in the corner of his office. "How did you get in here," he says. It is not a query, it is a demand, and his voice cracks with it. But she turns, slowly, gold trickling down her face and she is anything but human.<p>

"They're coming, Nick," she purrs and her voice catches in his throat, stealing his breath with surprise. "You should probably run." Her lips pull back from pearl teeth. He stands, fingers braced on the top of his desk.

"Not something I'm good at."

Her mouth tips into a smile, eyes looking at him, through him, past him and into forever. She leaves as sudden and noiselessly as she arrived. "I know," her voice brushes against his cheek.

* * *

><p><em>Like it? Love it? Review it!<em>


	3. Chapter 3

**AN:** This chapter is brought to you by Lorde and my coffee addiction.

**Disclaimer:**

I own nothing you recognise. This is all completely un-beta'd and totally fresh off the top of my brain!

* * *

><p>When Rose Tyler first appears on SHIELD's radar, she is an enigma wrapped in a quandry in a file on Agent Coulson's desk. She is a young English woman with no past and a peculiar future. She has managed to be on-site for no less than three 0-8-4s. Always in the background. The shop staff here. A waitress in a lonely diner there. Out of place with her accent and her smile, but unobtrusive. Always showed just the right amount of hysteria. Always disappeared afterwards.<p>

He is tasked with find out who she is. Fortunately, this time, she is working as a barista at a boutique coffee shop in down town New York. She tends to return to cafes in her 'downtime' between 0-8-4s.

He stops by on his way to work that morning. A shot of the house blend topped with cream – a remnant of his days in Brazil. She smiles at him around the coffee machine, tongue between teeth and eyes dancing like he is her personal joke. Their fingers brush as she passes him the coffee and the mask falls from her eyes. He is not quite sure what he's looking at anymore, and the hairs rise on the back of his neck, but the look is gone in a flash and she is once more a young woman with a full smile and twinkling eyes.

He drinks his coffee on his way to work. It's damn good coffee.

* * *

><p><em>Like it? Love it? Review it!<em>


	4. Chapter 4

**AN:** This chapter is brought to you by my never-ending love for my flatmate and her baking. Also for Pyre13, my first reviewer!

**Disclaimer:**

I own nothing you recognise. This is all completely un-beta'd and totally fresh off the top of my brain!

* * *

><p>Phil goes to that coffee shop every morning for the next two weeks. The file on one Rose Tyler, age unknown, grows.<p>

The first time he returns, she beams at him, eyes crinkling at the corners. "Didja like i' then?" she asks, dropping her consonants like they're going out of fashion. His second coffee is, unbelievably, better than the first.

Despite being delightfully chatty she is also incredibly vague about her past. "Oh, travelled here and there, bit of everywhere," she says with a grin. He is quite sure she knows his game and plays along, for a little while at least. She tells him of Scotland and a beautiful castle she stayed in once. She tells him she once managed to escape a Bedouin, to whom she had accidentally become betrothed, by stealing away with two of his prize camels in the night after so much feasting she could barely roll herself out of her tent.

All her stories make their way into the file on his desk. None of them quite add up.

* * *

><p><em>Like it? Love it? Review it!<em>


	5. Chapter 5

**AN:** This chapter is still fuelled by that deliciously awesome coconut milk cake with lemon icing. Probably shouldn't have had it so close to bed time.

**Disclaimer:**

I own nothing you recognise. This is all completely un-beta'd and totally fresh off the top of my brain!

* * *

><p>It is a month before Christmas and it's getting damn cold in New York. Phil can see his breath on the air as he makes his way to the coffee shop. Rose is jumping up and down behind the coffee machine, blowing on chapped fingers. "'Minds me a bit o' London," she says, starting up his coffee. The cashier girl takes the next customer's order.<p>

Before Phil can even contemplate pulling out his hidden firearm, Rose has moved between the cashier girl and the customer / armed robber. His arm is promptly broken and gun removed, full clip skittering across the counter top and loaded bullet popping out to join its compatriots on the counter.

He hands her a card with a phone number and an address on it. "Come by for a job interview," he says as she stuffs it in her pants pocket. He disappears out the door before the police can arrive. She slips out the back while the cashier girl sobs into a handsome officer's arms.

* * *

><p><em>Like it? Love it? Review it!<em>


	6. Chapter 6

**AN:** This chapter was written last night at way-past-bedtime-o'clock.

**Disclaimer:**

I own nothing you recognise. This is all completely un-beta'd and totally fresh off the top of my brain!

* * *

><p>She turns up the next morning, gloved fingers shoved into the pockets of an oversized full-length brown jacket. Her hair is contained by a multi-coloured knit beanie and matching scarf. Her nose is pink. Her smile is broad.<p>

Phil is surprised to see her.

"Well I just couldn' help myself, what with you bein' all mysterious an' all," she explains, rotating her shoulders in a peculiar circular shrug.

"Would you like to work for Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division?" he asks. She pauses her movement and looks at him quizzically. Twiddles with the edges of her sleeves.

"Sure, should be interesting for a while," she says.

* * *

><p><em>Like it? Love it? Review it!<em>


	7. Chapter 7

**AN:** This chapter was also written last night at way-past-bedtime-o'clock. The next chapter(s) will be fuelled by experimental eggnog (with coconut cream because I forgot I needed real cream) and tortellini.

**Disclaimer:**

I own nothing you recognise. This is all completely un-beta'd and totally fresh off the top of my brain!

* * *

><p>She annihilates every endurance test they throw at her. Oh she never beats time scores, nor does she show any super-human strength, but she completes everything <em>and then goes for more<em>. The testers are a mixture of amazed and horrified. Phil is smug.

Her physical, oddly after the first round of basic endurance, begins normally enough. She is asked to strip to her underclothes for a complete examination.

Scars pucker in a horrific 'Y' from her collarbones to her sternum, descending down the valley between her breasts to continue to her navel. It then splits once more to curve down to her hips. Her spine is not a sensual display of curves and dips but rather a jagged mound of white tissue, running from beneath her hair right down to below the line of her underpants.

She watches them, eyes shuttered and dark. Quiet judgement in the neutral line of her shoulders. It takes longer for the doctor to recover.

"How did you get them?" Phil asks.

"Experiments," she replies.

* * *

><p><em>Like it? Love it? Review it!<em>


	8. Chapter 8

**AN:** This chapter was, indeed, fuelled by truly experimental eggnog. It was delicious.

**Disclaimer:**

I own nothing you recognise. This is all completely un-beta'd and totally fresh off the top of my brain!

* * *

><p>They poke her and prod her and she takes it all with great dignity. They listen to her heart and her lungs, test her patellar reflex and her ankle jerk reflex. Pupil response to light, everything they can think of. She remains taciturn about the experiments undertaken on her.<p>

Then they take her blood, and as they're putting a plaster on, her skin heals up. She catches the eyes of each person in the room in turn. "Now you know why," she says, voice a low purr that spoke of deadly promises.

"Not here," he replies, and he means it.

"Not while you live," she says, eyes flashing gold as the light catches them.

* * *

><p><em>Like it? Love it? Review it!<em>


	9. Chapter 9

**AN:** This chapter is all Beloved-Stranger.

**Disclaimer:**

I own nothing you recognise. This is all completely un-beta'd and totally fresh off the top of my brain!

* * *

><p>It is two weeks to Christmas and Phil walks into his office, a beautiful shot of espresso topped with whipped cream made courtesy of his new ward, Rose Tyler.<p>

"What is this?" he asks, blinking at the tinsel edging almost every surface, red baubles dangling from the ceiling. A sprig of holly hangs on the back of his screen.

"Christmas decorations!" Rose yells from her desk part-way down the hall. "You're welcome!"

He places his coffee on his desk and begins to clear the tinsel and take down the baubles.

The next day he walks into his office and a proximity bomb explodes at chest height, decorating his suit with tiny red and green and silver snowflakes. When the decorations return, he does not remove them. He stops wearing that suit after Agent Hill comments on the colourful trail he leaves behind him two months later.

* * *

><p><em>Like it? Love it? Review it!<em>


	10. Chapter 10

**AN:** This chapter is fuelled by a continuation of that experimental eggnog and 3 hours of Dragon Age: Inquisition.

MERRY CATMAS ALL!

**Disclaimer:**

I own nothing you recognise. This is all completely un-beta'd and totally fresh off the top of my brain!

* * *

><p>Phil learns that Rose Tyler is a crack shot. It comes rather suddenly, in the form of an adhesive NERF bullet to the middle of his forehead. She giggles from the darkness beneath her desk. He signs her up for marksman training.<p>

And adds another pile of reports for her to review into her in-tray. The punishment must suit the crime, after all.

She enacts her revenge by using decaf in his morning espresso shots.

* * *

><p><em>Like it? Love it? Review it!<em>


	11. Chapter 11

**AN:** This chapter brought to you by excessive Boxing Day shopping and Star Trek music fanvids.

**Disclaimer:**

I own nothing you recognise. This is all completely un-beta'd and totally fresh off the top of my brain!

* * *

><p>"How old are you?" Phil asks one day as he drops off more reports. She looks up and grins.<p>

"Don't you know it's rude to ask a lady her age?" she replies glibly. Her tongue peaks out between her teeth as she grins him down. He returns to his office, thwarted by his ward's cheerfully secretive manner.

She tells him on their second mission, when all has gone to shit and she is applying a brutal tourniquet to his leg to slow the bleeding from the hole in his thigh, there courtesy of an unexpected bullet. "If I still had my vortex manipulator, I could tell you my exact age. I stopped counting after a while, but I think I'm closing in on half a millennia." She says it in part apology, part distraction as she yanks the tourniquet – her belt – tight enough over upper his thigh to slow the blood chugging through his femoral artery and onto the floor.

"That explains a lot," he grits out around her glove, which she had whipped off and shoved in his mouth so he didn't destroy his teeth. Her mouth twitches into a grim smile.

"You don't get to my age without learning a few things in the meantime. Now, let's get to evac. Stetson's cleaned up." She hoists him up and together they hobble out of the 'abandoned' warehouse in the boonsticks.

* * *

><p><em>Like it? Love it? Review it!<em>


	12. Chapter 12

**AN:** This chapter brought to you by Star Trek music fanvids. A lot of my friends are bikers (fast sports bikes only). I rode on the back of one once. I think I'll stick to riding horses.

**Disclaimer:**

I own nothing you recognise. This is all completely un-beta'd and totally fresh off the top of my brain!

* * *

><p>She's also a speed demon. Their third mission evac gets fucked to high hell. There's a motorbike, sleek and demonic, lying in wait in the garage. Rose whistles her appreciation, fingers tracing the line of the seat. She looks at Phil with a wicked grin. "You're going to want to hold on tight," she says as she straddles the bike. Phil eyes it warily before hopping up behind her and wrapping his arms around her stomach.<p>

She kicks off the stand, starts the engine and revs it. It _howls_. A somewhat more tentative throttle has them moving but as soon as they're out the garage door, she opens up and suddenly Phil can't breathe and it's all he can do to cling to her and press his face into her back. She howls back at the bike, into the wind, full of euphoria.

When they finally stop and he climbs off the back, his knees are jelly and his stomach is still somewhere back in that garage. Her hair is a riot about her head and her eyes are sparkling. She is more alive than he has ever seen her.

* * *

><p><em>Like it? Love it? Review it!<em>


	13. Chapter 13

**AN:** This chapter is brought to you by I-need-more-coffee and it's-way-too-late-o'clock.

**Disclaimer:**

I own nothing you recognise. This is all completely un-beta'd and totally fresh off the top of my brain!

* * *

><p>Rose is still an enigma wrapped in a quandry in a series of files in Agent Coulson's desk. Every mention gets an entry. Every adventure, every person. She is frustratingly vague on any details. There are never any names – places or otherwise. No, she is far too careful for that.<p>

He also doesn't believe that she's spent all her time on Earth. She'd have hit their radar a lot sooner otherwise.

So, under guise of celebrating a successful mission (with no death-defying motorbike escapes or holes through various body parts), Phil takes Rose to the SHIELD bar and buys her a drink. She grins, flashing teeth, but accepts a neat top shelf whiskey.

They match each other, drink for drink until it devolves to shots, and they continue. Phil gushes over his love of the old-style Corvettes. Rose gushes over her love of the old Jaguar E-types. They bond over classic cars until neither of them can see straight, and Phil completely forgets he was going to pump her for information while she was drunk.

He walks into work the next morning looking like death warmed up. Rose grins brightly at him and puts a mug into one hand, lifting his other hand up and wrapping it around the warm cup. "It's a hangover cure I picked up," she says. "I don't need them anymore, but everyone who drinks with me does."

When he can write without wanting to split his own head open, that tidbit gets added to her file.

* * *

><p><em>Like it? Love it? Review it!<em>


	14. Chapter 14

**AN:** Yes, it really is that short. Sorry guys. Also Happy New Year!

**Disclaimer:**

I own nothing you recognise. This is all completely un-beta'd and totally fresh off the top of my brain!

* * *

><p>One morning, Rose presses a new cup into his hands, filled with his morning coffee. It says "World's Best Boss" in pink sparkly paint.<p>

It spends its time in the most prominent position on his desk. Rose smiles every time she sees it.

* * *

><p><em>Like it? Love it? Review it!<em>


	15. Chapter 15

**AN:** I was going to put this in later, but, well, here you go. To make up for the short previous chapter. And I'm feeling angsty-pantsy. Now I'm going to go read some nice, angsty Dragon Age fanfiction.

**Disclaimer:**

I own nothing you recognise. This is all completely un-beta'd and totally fresh off the top of my brain!

* * *

><p>She comes in wearing a blue suit and converse shoes. She wears them all week, eyes distant. Her mouth, so generous with its smiles, is less so in blue.<p>

"Is there an occasion?" Phil eventually asks on the third day. She pauses in organising the paginated report (with exhibits) for binding. Looks at him levelly. Never having been one to fidget, Phil had never understood the compulsion. Until now, honey-brown eyes dissecting him. He resists until her eyes leave him.

"Let's go get a drink," she says and sets the report to one side.

It is many drinks later before she begins to talk. "I'm not from here," she mumbles before throwing back a shot of something sweet and strong. Phil swears the bartender is just making this shit up as they drink.

"I gathered that," Phil replies. She levels another look at him and he almost shrinks back into himself. Instead he waits her out.

"This isn't my universe," she continues. Phil wisely keeps silent. "Either of them." She takes another shot, Phil matches her. "I wear this suit because this is the week it all happened. The day I died, the day I was stranded. The day we returned. The day a great man was killed and I became a test subject for the institution I helped develop."

Phil remains quiet a she expunges, words tripping over one another. Tells him about the man – alien – known only as the Doctor. How they had travelled through time and space, and how at the last, she was stranded on the wrong side of an inter-dimensional rift. How she went back, saved him, and was deposited back once more with a … clone … of the man she loved. A truly mortal one, with a human life-span.

The day they realised she wasn't aging. The day she left Torchwood to convalesce with her husband, to enjoy all the time she had with him with the knowledge that she would outlive him by centuries.

The day Torchwood reclaimed her and shot him as he sought to protect her from them.

The alcohol flows to temper the horrors that tumble from her lips. The live autopsies. How they cracked open her rib cage and kept it open for months, removing portions of her bone, liver, one of her lungs, to admire their regrowth. How they removed half of her spinal chord and kept that bare to the elements while it grew back over agonising years. She tells him that, when they finally closed her up, they had to resect the edges of her skin to force them to heal together.

Then she tells him how, after fifteen years, one tiny woman helped her to escape, at the cost of her own life. Smuggled in the suit and jacket, the vortex manipulator she had hidden before her capture.

"This was his suit," she says quietly. "I had it altered to fit, he was a beanpole and a half."

Phil just stares at her. "I think we need some more to drink." She laughs, finally, sadly, but knocks her shot glass with his and downs it in tandem.

* * *

><p><em>Like it? Love it? Review it!<em>


	16. Chapter 16

**AN:** Brought to you by it's too hot and my brain is on fire with Dragon Age fanfiction. So I'm taking it out on Rose and Phil.

**Disclaimer:**

I own nothing you recognise. This is all completely un-beta'd and totally fresh off the top of my brain!

* * *

><p>She is a changed woman in the weeks following their talk, as though speaking of the horrors loosened their hold on her.<p>

She is, if anything, more cheeky. She tinkers. The coffee machine starts making odd noises when particular people approach it. The toaster gains what looks like a bastard child between an eggbeater and a wireless antennae that occasionally twirls. No one is quite sure what it does, but it still produces toast, so people leave it be.

Her tales take on a whole new meaning, and have a whole new level of detail.

"Elves," she says one morning. "Not even kidding, legit wood elves, like Lord of the Rings, yeh?" She laughs at Phil's slightly stunned look. In his defence, this was blurted while she passes him his morning coffee. "They even lived in trees, it was fantastic. Oh it was so beautiful. They'd made tiny solar emitters to light up their paths into the trees. Never did get to take one of them apart, I'd have loved to see how they managed to make the batteries _so tiny_." She flops into her desk chair and spins.

"Why don't you go back?" he asks. She stops her spinning abruptly and levels That Look at him, the one where he can't possibly fathom the thoughts swirling behind her gold-flecked eyes. She shrugs and goes back to twizzling the chair around.

"Don't got a vortex manipulator anymore," she replies simply.

"Couldn't you make one?" he pursues. She shakes her head with a sad grin.

"Nope, I need a intra-dimensional inverted expander, and a extra-dimensional recombobulator, not to mention an ionic reconstitution sprogget," she rattles, waving her finger in the air as she explains. He's not even sure if they're real things. "And you can only get them at the Kofteshkin markets in thirty fifteen, or at the -" she makes a guttural noise at the back of her throat that sounds like she is hawking up phlegm "- markets, and they only happen once every few years on the fifteenth Enday of the year, and it's _always_ in a different city." She sighs, tipping her head back.

"Nae matter," she says, bracing herself forward and onto her desk. "I'm quite enjoying a bit of stability in my life." She beams at Phil and he totters off, dismissed, with his cup of sweet, sweet caffeinated goodness.

It all goes into the file.

It's not until a few weeks and many more puzzling conversations later that he realises she never told him how she got _here_.

* * *

><p><em>Like it? Love it? Review it!<em>


	17. Chapter 17

**AN:** It's warm. Really warm. And I should go to sleep now.

**Disclaimer:**

I own nothing you recognise. This is all completely un-beta'd and totally fresh off the top of my brain!

* * *

><p>The first time she changes, she well and truly scares the shit out of everyone. They are sweeping a terrorist cell with purported links to Baron von Trapp, the great grandson of Corvette Captain Georg Johannes von Trapp of World War I fame, a man who is suspected of ensuring various cells acquire technology they should not have.<p>

One moment she is there, the next she is gone and _no one saw her move_. A howl unfurls from the bowels of the facility that terrifies them. His feet are encased by fear, clawing up his spine, spinning his brain. The noise cuts off and he can move again, and move he does, swiftly and silently.

They meet no one. There are no bodies.

Until they reach a cavernous room at the heart of the facility. Auric vapour drips from the woman in the centre of the room, slinking across the floor, coiling about the bars of cages and smoothing up the skeletal legs of young girls within. Ochre tangles through curls and down her back. She stands resolute. Before her are the only bodies they ever find, brains gracing the stone walls behind them.

Her guns are still holstered.

Agent Coulson gestures to the other three agents to tend to the cages, to wade through the honeyed mist and rescue the children. He steps towards the dripping, trickling, terrifying figure.

She turns around and her eyes, fire and rage and unmercifully inhuman, bore into his.

"Who are you?" he asks.

"I am Bad Wolf," the words fall from her lips and his spine cramps in dread. He swallows, chokes on his own voice.

"Where are the other men?" he braves, indicating the death on the walls.

"Gone." Her voice snaps across his skin, crackles into his ears. She turns back and flicks her fingers in distaste, sparks rising from the circling mist to devour the bodies until the only note of their passing is the brain globlets trickling down the wall.

She flickers from existence before he can reach for her.

* * *

><p><em>Like it? Love it? Review it!<em>


	18. Chapter 18

**AN:** For all you lovely, awesome, fantabulous people who have reviewed and/or watched and/or favourited, I love you guys. You're what keep me going. The chapters probably won't get a huge amount longer, I'm loving these short, sweet chaplets.

I rewrote this chapter three times. It works, now.

**Disclaimer:**

I own nothing you recognise. This is all completely un-beta'd and totally fresh off the top of my brain!

* * *

><p>Rose Tyler slinks into Phil's office two days later and closes the door.<p>

"What the hell was that?" he asks as she perches on the edge of the chair, facing him with her hands folded neatly in her lap. As though she is not multiple times older than he, but rather a defiant child expecting a scolding. She purses her lips. Phil collapses in his chair and runs a hand down his face.

"That is what I am," she says. She does not elaborate.

"_What_ was that?" he pushes. Her eyes are shuttered when she looks at him.

"What I am," she replies, voice oh so carefully light.

"Can you control it?" he asks instead.

"To an extent."

"Are you a threat?"

"No more or less than you." Her eyes flick away from him, staring at a point over his shoulder. Closing herself off from him as surely as if she'd slammed a door in his face.

"Rose," he says, trying to re-establish that vital connection, to catch her eyes. It works. Her gold-flecked eyes twitch back to him. "Why didn't you raise this earlier?"

Her grin is lopsided and wry. "I trust you, Phil," she says. "And I trust that you will _always_ do the right thing. I don't trust SHIELD." Her fingers brush against her sternum, and his eyes are drawn there, remembering what lies beneath the cloth. "I know about the file." His eyes widen for a moment before his Agent face is back on. Her eyes turn soft and she cocks her head to one side. "Oh relax, it's not like I sneaked a peak, nor is it entirely surprising. I've had worse."

"I still have to report this, you know."

"I'm surprised you haven't already."

"I wanted to wait for you to touch base first, I'm holding the whole team's reports back. There will be an interrogation."

"I expect so."

Phil almost pinches the bridge of his nose. It is a very near thing. Instead he leans back in his chair and steeples his fingers. "I will submit the reports now. Because of the nature of the reports, they'll be processed immediately. I suspect you will be called in within a few hours. I'd appreciate it if you would spend the next few hours mocking up an outline of your own report." She nods and stands to leave.

"Thank you for saving the girls," he says, and she pauses, fingers tracing the door handle. "They said the men were lining up to shoot them before you arrived."

She flashes a smile over her shoulder, all tooth and fury. "That's why I did it." She opens the door and slips out.

* * *

><p><em>Like it? Love it? Review it!<em>


	19. Chapter 19

**AN:** Now that I'm back at work, I have little time to relax and brainfart my creativity onto paper. Touch wood I get accepted to uni and I can spend a bit more time being creative :)

In the meantime, late night snippet!

**Disclaimer:**

I own nothing you recognise. This is all completely un-beta'd and totally fresh off the top of my brain!

* * *

><p>It doesn't end there. They stare at her from the other side of one-way glass, looking into an interrogation chamber. She sits, hands cupped in her lap, chin tipped high and eyes flashing. Director Fury had her escourted there. She hasn't moved in over two hours but to blink. Director Fury is beginning to fidget.<p>

Phil is past the fidgeting stage, though you would not know it to look at him.

She pours to her feet, hands still clasped demurely in front. Steps up to the mirror. Dead in front of the director. Her eyes trickle gold dust and her mouth pours honey. "You are at a crossroads," she purrs, schism in her vocal chords. Near every hair on Phil's body leaps to attention. Judging by the tightness around the director's jaw, he is not immune either. "You can ask the question, and I will leave." Her eyes meet Phil's across the glass. "Or you can hold your curiosity, and I will remain."

The eyes of predatory gold circle back to Director Fury. They wait.

He steps from the viewing room. Unlocks the door to Rose Tyler. Stares impassively at her as she leaves the room with honey coloured eyes, giving him a nod as she brushes past him.

He returns to the viewing room. Stands next to Phil in silence for some time, staring at the empty chair and open door. "I'd rather have her on our side," he finally says.

"I think that is a wise move," Phil replies.

The reports of The Incident are sealed. No one speaks of it again.

* * *

><p><em>Like it? Love it? Review it!<em>


	20. Chapter 20

**AN:** Yep, work devours all that energy I've got. But I've got a three day weekend coming up next, I might get a bit more inspiration to do stuff on things then!

**Disclaimer:**

I own nothing you recognise. This is all completely un-beta'd and totally fresh off the top of my brain!

* * *

><p>Her chair dings. Then it howls and the contraption on top spins. She rockets from it, slapping a big blue button she'd installed into the arm last week. She runs out the door with her cry of "be back soon!" following after her.<p>

She tumbles back in three days later, impeccably dressed in a black suit, hair running riot and eyes glowing. She bounces on the balls of her feet and can't seem to stop smiling.

"What was that?" Phil asks.

"False alarm," she replies, spinning her chair around before plopping herself into it as though she never left.

"What took you so long?"

"I may have accidentally appeared in New Zealand in my excitement," she says, smile taking over and teeth shining.

"That's impressive," Phil says, genuinely impressed.

"But I couldn't figure out how to get it going again, so I had to fly economy back." She laughs. "Longest haul I've ever done, I'll try to avoid that in the future."

"Probably a good idea," Phil replies mildly, returning to his office.

* * *

><p><em>Like it? Love it? Review it!<em>


End file.
